Maddox, Richard Leach

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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b. 1816 Bath, England

d. 1902 Southampton, England

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English physician, amateur photographer and photomicrographer, inventor of the first practicable gelatine silver halide emulsion.

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Maddox studied medicine, but dogged by ill health he travelled widely, eventually settling in Constantinople (now Istanbul), where he married in 1849. After further migrations, Maddox returned to England in the 1870s. He had become interested in photography and was awarded medals for his photomicrographs. Searching for a substitute for collodion to hold the sensitive silver salts, Maddox devised a gelatine bromide emulsion that gave acceptable results, and he published details in 1871. Gelatine had been tried by earlier experimenters, but the results were poor; the plates made by Maddox were slow and lacked density, but they pointed the way to the modern gelatine halide emulsions which continued to form the basis of photographic emulsions in the 1990s.

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Bibliography

1871, British Journal of Photography 8 (September):422–3 (first published details of Mad-dox's emulsion).

Further Reading

J.M.Eder, 1945, History of Photography, trans E. Epstean, New York.

H.Gernsheim and A, Gernsheim, 1969, The History of Photography, rev. edn, London: Phandon.

JW